A manual workflow is defined as a workflow that has no trigger and is instead manually started by a store manager. Existing workflows would be considered 'automatic' workflows in comparison.
A manual workflow would need a primary data type (e.g. order, customer, subscription) which would define which rules, actions and variables could be used in the workflow.
A manual workflow could be started from a related admin page. E.g. an order manual workflow could be initiated from the edit order page. Alternatively, manual workflows could be started from a custom interface that allows selecting a set of items to be triggered. It would be useful to select items by a date range and select multiple items by ID.
This system would be a replacement for the manual order and subscription trigger tools.
If you have any use cases for manual workflows please add them as a comment :)
After a consultation, my team would hit a button to allow a workflow to trigger. Currently hacking it by having them add a specific word to an order note, to trigger the workflow. Can't wait for this!
@Marcy Capron Vermillion: Thanks for the feedback!
I would love to see us be able to manually trigger based on order # (either single order or the ability to add multiple orders at one time) as well. That would be a huge help to the issue we have now!
@Dan Bitzer: Do we have an ETA? I see it has been planned since April so I am curious when this will go live since we have an urgent need for this due to the botched move from AW to WooCommerce platforms.
@Lauren Goldstein: It has been planned for a while but development started recently. My guess would be January but I certainly can't guarantee anything. It could be ready sooner/later.
@Dan Bitzer: Thanks for the update - still on track for January?
@Luke Abell: I don't think so, we're aiming for Q1 2020. We might have a beta out beforehand if you're interested in trying that.
@Dan Bitzer: Absolutely! We are in the process of building similar functionality that hooks into our data models to query existing orders/users/members/etc using custom triggers/rules. We’ve been diving deep into the AutomateWoo core so a beta would be much appreciated to avoid double work on our end as we build it out!
@Luke Abell: Ok great I'll let you know when we've got a beta ready!
@Dan Bitzer: Thank you!!
@Dan Bitzer - I'd love to get access to beta too when it's ready!
@Saul: Sure, will let you know! Thanks!
@Dan Bitzer: Any update on this? Are you guys still on track for Q1 2020? - thanks!
@Luke Abell: A few things are in flux at the moment but I'm hopeful for a Q1 beta version at the least.
Another use case:
Manually target all customers that have an active subscription with a specific product when there's an update to the product. This would be perfect to send out notifications about software updates or when there's new additional content for a digital product subscription.
We've built a custom 'reminder' trigger, which sends an email every week to customers without an active subscription, reminding them to place an order.
We also use it to send ad-hoc emails to customers when new products are launched (replaced mailchimp).
Our implementation is somewhat of a hack (happy to share the code though), so it'd be awesome to see this implemented as an official feature!
@Saul: Any chance you could share your code for this?
@Luke Abell: Sure - just reach out to us on live chat (tigerdigital.co.uk) and we'll send it across.
excited that this is planned
i look through the idea board and every time i see your ideas i LOVE them
this would be an AMAZING addition......
this can be used for many cases. example when I want to bulk change ALL subscription prices (only based on certain products)
(triggers are limited and pre-loading all customer, subscription data and applying rules and then actions to them would be amazing)
i can probably think of many cases
Must-have feature. Please, move this feature to the top of your list. Call me if you need help. I'm working with one client that uses AutomateWoo and being stucked at "Trigger" mandatory field is like having half tool to do double work.